Amazon Web Services is offering on its Marketplace annual subscriptions to over 90 software products, which could help customers cut software costs by over 40 percent, the Amazon.com unit said.

Customers can purchase AWS Marketplace products on an annual subscription basis and have unlimited use of the software for that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance for the next 12 months, wrote Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, in a blog post on Monday.

Users can apply one annual subscription to a Marketplace software product to one EC2 instance, Amazon said in its help section.

The products on offer under the annual subscription program include those from software vendors such as Alert Logic, Barracuda Networks, Citrix Systems, Fortinet, Riverbed Technology and Sophos. The new AWS Marketplace annual subscription options potentially allow capital expenditure savings of up to 40 percent when compared to hourly pricing over the same 12-month period, Fortinet said in a statement Monday.

AWS Marketplace offers software for developers and enterprises covering 26 categories in areas such as infrastructure, developer tools, and business applications.

The new pricing model will let users forecast more accurately software expenses when running steady-state workloads, reduce software costs by 10 to 40 percent or more when users purchase an annual subscription for select software products on AWS Marketplace, Barr wrote. Users can continue to pay for usage on an hourly basis in conditions where their workload is bursty, he added.

Users that are currently paying for a product on an hourly basis can convert to an annual subscription pricing by simply buying the subscription as needed, without requiring to restart the instance or re-launch the application, according to Barr.

The software on an Amazon EC2 instance can be run in any region, as long as the software is offered in that region, although prices for the EC2 instance could vary by regions, AWS said in its help section.

Users can change the instance type after contacting AWS customer support with the request. The existing annual subscription will remain valid, but the Amazon EC2 charges may vary depending on the new instance type selected, AWS said.

When the annual subscription expires, users pay at the hourly rate for the software product and instance type, if they do not buy a new annual subscription.